Seduction

The number wasn’t in my contacts, but the first two lines forced me to read to the end. What came next changed everything I remembered about Saturday.

She smelled of clean skin and expensive perfume. My tongue moved before my mind did, and when she turned and looked at me, I knew there was no turning back.

It was almost eleven at night and the whole building seemed empty. When I turned my chair around, all that was missing was someone opening that door. And they did.

I thought the vodka had clouded my head, but when she closed the hotel room door I knew she’d been waiting for that exact moment for years.

Three hours earlier I’d bitten her neck under warm water. Now another man held her arm like she was his, and she didn’t pull away.

Lucía looked at me over the fire and I knew that night we wouldn’t be sleeping alone. Two bottles of wine were missing and no one was talking about going to bed anymore.

She wore a miniskirt, black stockings, and sunglasses that kept me from knowing when she’d caught me watching. Until she stopped pretending and started playing with me.

It was our first sleepover with her parents away. When she turned out the light, her hand found mine beneath the sheets, and I understood she’d waited years for that gesture.

Between boxes, with the door barely closed, she bit her lip to keep from screaming while I held her against my chest. No one could hear us.

At forty-eight, in a Miami bar, my best friend grabbed me by the neck and kissed me. It was my first time with a woman, and I knew I could never go back.

She was my assistant at the office, an impossible beauty who kept stealing my gaze. One night, over chat, I discovered everything her tight clothes had been hiding from me for weeks.

I followed her upstairs with my eyes fixed on her skirt, never imagining that I wouldn’t be the one making the decisions that night.

It was eleven in the morning and the cove was empty, except for a guy pretending not to watch me. My husband was swimming and I could feel his eyes fixed on every inch of my skin.

I arrived at the square expecting a polite coffee with the woman who taught me to read poems at seventeen. What happened next wasn’t in any book.

When I reached the clearing, Iker was already waiting, leaning against the rock, with that nervous smile he only ever gave me when we were alone.

When he told me he looked like the singer behind the counter when he dressed up, his mother smiled and I understood it wouldn’t stay a joke.

When my phone buzzes at four in the morning I know it’s him, that no one else wanted him tonight, and that he’ll pay anything if I show up.

I’d known him for years, and nothing had ever happened between us—until that afternoon in the park, when he looked at me differently and everything began to change, very slowly.

She was twenty-one and the daughter of my best friend’s partner. I taught her equations; she taught me not to ask where she’d been on the nights she disappeared.

I was wearing my favorite dress the day those two men understood, without me saying a word, exactly what I was willing to give them.